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With all the new sites up and running it gets more and more difficult for users to really know the scope of a site and thus a lot of questions a migrated to places where they are (probably even more) off-topic, see e.g. here. So I request the opposite of Allow migrating if you have enough rep on either the source or target sites:

Allow migration if you have enough rep on both the source and the target site
(the target reputation required could be a bit lower, say 5001)

That way questions could only be migrated by users familiar with the scope of both sites who can really estimate where the question is better. Maybe those who don't have the rep on the target site could still be able to cast a flagging-only-but-not-counting-as-vote vote...

1) Courtesy of Tim Post's answer

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3 Answers 3

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I'm at 12K + on SO, but under 1k on both SF and SU. I've been migrating questions to both for over a year without any complaints (that I know of).

I think this would delay migration of questions that really should be shipped off somewhere else before they start getting answers, so the whole process is less confusing to the original poster. I think this is somewhat self defeating for the self moderating aspect of stack exchange.

Perhaps, simply require that the person migrating has sufficient reputation on the target site to understand its scope and community, say ... 250 - 500, as well as the usual reputation on the original site.

If you have 500 rep on math.se, I'm reasonably sure that you understand what is and is not appropriate there. I'm not even a member there, so I would refrain from sending them a question.

I think your suggestion is the simplest path to avoid irritating the users of the receiving community, and most importantly, the person who asked a question.

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    Yes indeed the reputation requirement should not necessarily be symmetric, thanks for that suggestion Jan 6, 2011 at 8:46
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    Umm, exactly where should complaints about migration go? May 9, 2012 at 19:55
  • @RBarryYoung One migration, or a series of bad migrations that's looking like a trend?
    – user50049
    May 10, 2012 at 4:10
  • @Tim Post: either? May 10, 2012 at 19:59
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I think if you have the rep to migrate from a particular site, when you choose to close and then select off-topic, the list that comes up should only include sites where you have a certain rep level (I'm thinking 1000). So if you are not active on a site, it doesn't exist to you for the purpose of migrating to, anyway. This should reduce the number of WTF migrations that are promptly closed when they get to the new site.

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    +1 and additionally, with the new "flag for migration" mechanism, one could still suggest a migration to one of the other sites without actually voting Feb 17, 2011 at 14:57
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We now require that a migrated question have at least one tag in common with the target site before we will allow it to be migrated there.

We also disallow blacklisted tags on the target site, and apply proper tag synonym rules for the target site.

Diamond mods can skip the final check and migrate even if there are no tags in common, but for regular close votes, if the final check does not pass, the question is simply closed as off topic and not migrated anywhere.

As for the request itself: unworkable. This would limit migrations so incredibly severely in practice that we might as well stop migrating questions anywhere. It is exceedingly rare for users to have multiple high rep accounts in the network.

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    So in the worst case this will mean that we have to edit the tags before voting to migrate, and we'll have to know a few tags on the target site.
    – Pollyanna
    Feb 17, 2011 at 18:58
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    @polly it's still an improvement.. why you gotta hate on my kaizen, yo? Feb 17, 2011 at 23:09
  • KAIZEN HOOOOOOOO!
    – Pollyanna
    Feb 18, 2011 at 1:36
  • +1 that's a pretty good start, although this might cause the appearance of metatags-for-migration by some creative minds. Still, I remember even yourself having mentioned² that the same tag can have an entirely different meaning on another site (although it's unlikely if there actually is a valid reason for a migration path to exist) ²) I think it was in response to a "one place to ask all questions and let tags determine on which SE site to put it" suggestion Feb 18, 2011 at 8:14

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